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HOME FRONT; Joblessness, a Bit More His Than Hers

WHO, exactly, are the unemployed these days? It's not that easy to get an answer.

You might think the government knows, and it does, sort of. Or will, eventually. The federal government does a telephone survey each month so that it can calculate the official unemployment rate.

But the number of people questioned is tiny. And even so, it will be months or years before researchers analyze all the data. Critics also point out that many unemployed people don't have telephones, or aren't around to answer them.

Then there are anecdotal descriptions. Some commuters have a simple definition of the unemployed: the people they used to see on the train every morning who aren't filling the seats anymore. PTA leaders may see the unemployed in a sudden surge of volunteers, people who used to be too busy to pick their children up at school.

You may notice the unemployed holding ''office hours'' at Starbucks, or using the computers at the public library to perform job searches. They may be the new faces turning up at the food bank, or the people haunting storefront employment agencies, desperate storefront employment agencies, desperate for even a day's pay.

Another way to get a snapshot of the jobless, if not a complete portrait, is to look at who has been receiving unemployment insurance benefits. It is only a sketch, because many people who are out of work do not qualify for benefits; they worked only part time, perhaps, or for too short a stretch, a made too little money.

''At least half of the unemployment are not reflected in the data,'' said James Parrott, deputy director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, a labor-backed research group. At the same time, he noted, certain industries like construction usually have a lot of workers receiving benefits, because their employment is seasonal.

The data have other quirks. The New York State Department of Labor releases 12-month moving averages, so it's not clear how many people were getting benefits in August, only how many were getting benefits, on average, in the 12 months ending in August. And August is the most recent month of available data.

So the following picture is not panoramic.

But given all those caveats, here is the typical unemployed person in New York City: male, between the ages of 25 and 34, with a high school degree, and a previous job in a white-collar service-sector (in something like advertising or accounting or computer services).

That would have been the picture the previous year (the ''before 9/11'' year), too, but with one different. A year ago, the typical unemployed person would probably have been a woman.

Unemployment in New York City is divided remarkably equally between men and women, at least according to the benefits data. A year ago, 49.4 percent of recipients were male; now, about 50.6 percent are.

The number of people of both sexes receiving benefits has soared by 58 percent in the 12-month period, to an average of 95,360 from 60,440; the rate of increase among men has just been slightly higher than the rate for women.

There have been some other interesting changes, too. People with ''professional'' jobs, as the labor department defines them, are now the second largest group of unemployed people, after blue-collar workers; a year ago, clerical workers were No. 2.

And there has been a surge in unemployment among the highly educated. Though their numbers are still small, those with more than four years of college rose by 68 percent, to 6,250, on average, in the latest 12 months. The number of unemployed people with four years of college almost doubled, to 18,050.

The industries that produced all these unemployed people are the ones you might expect: business services, manufacturing (especially apparel and printing), retailing, finance and construction. The drop in tourism also created an increase in laid-off workers at hotels, restaurants and airports.

Men dominated the construction layoffs; women lost the majority of manufacturing jobs (because of the garment industry) and were also harder hit by cutbacks in the finance area, which includes banking.

And of all the employers tracked by the Labor Department, only one produced fewer laid-off workers this year than it did the year before. It's also the one the least connected to the New York economy. It is, of course, the federal government. Somehow, that just figures.